Back in April I had a jiujitsu competition, and as promised in my subsequent CSA post, here is the write up! If you’re new to my BJJ saga, buckle up: this post is an Origin Story as much as it is a recap. If you’re new to my art-and-writing saga, you can read that Origin Story over here. And if you like, consider joining the CSA to get posts like this and more delivered weekly to your inbox.

Thanks, and enjoy the show.

To Fight is to Win

Competing in BJJ and the Whitewater Mindset

April 6 2024

I’m upside-down on a mat and a teenage ninja is putting me into an involuntary version of Plow Pose. Danny is yelling what I’m sure is very sound advice but I can’t hear it anymore. All I hear is her breathing and my breathing and inside my head a little voice saying “You’ve been through worse.”

This isn’t making sense. Let’s rewind.

May 2005

I’m upside-down underwater. At least I think I’m upside-down. It’s hard to tell. The last thing I remember seeing is the bottom of the raft as it stood up sideways, tipped on end by the wave that drove us against the boulder. The same wave that’s now recirculating me in a little pocket of aerated water at the base of said boulder. I’ve been here for a while now, and I’m not washing out. There’s enough CO2 in my system that I need to start breathing soon, but all around me is water water water and it’s white and I’m weightless and so, since I’ve got nothing left to lose, I do what you’re not supposed to do in a whitewater hole and I swim up. I get one very strange breath of water so aerated it’s practically air and then I can feel the boulder behind me and I push myself off it, into the current, and away.

It’s 2005, I’m a teenager—and I’m not a ninja, I’m a river rat. I’m halfway down the Class IV stretch of the Kaweah River in California and I’m mostly thinking about how I’m going to be teased for falling out of the boat.

Woops. I went back to far. Fast-forward seventeen years.

March 9 2022

It’s a dark, snowy morning in March. I’m in my thirties, in Central Oregon, in the parking lot of an O’Reilly’s at 5:45. A car pulls into a parking stall next to me and a man gets out. He looks very Central Oregonian: wide shoulders, comfortable sweatshirt, short hair.

“Excuse me,” I ask him. “I’m looking for Connection Rio Jiu Jitsu Academy. Am I in the right place?”

“Yes, you are,” Professor Dennis Asche, owner of Connection Rio Jiu Jitsu Academy, tells me. Even in the dark, I can tell that he’s smiling.

Almost there. Fast-forward two more years.

February 2024

“You have to train at least four times a week. No excuses.”

It’s 2024, the end of February. I’ve been training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu under Dennis Asche and his team of instructors for two years, in the 2-3 times a week way one does when one lives in Central Oregon, works multiple jobs, and goes mountain biking every chance she gets. But the mountain biking is particularly crummy right now: that stage of the thaw when there’s either too much snow for snow biking, or it’s slush, or it’s solid ice. And, on the white board at the head of the gym, the words AGF Redmond, April 6th competitors must train 4x week have been standing for the last month, as more and more names accumulate below them in red dry-erase marker.

AGF is American Grappling Federation, and they run tournaments all over the US and the world. Previously, Connection Rio athletes have had to travel over the Cascade Range or the Columbia Gorge to get to their events in Eugene or Pasco. But for the first time, AGF was putting on the Bend Jiu Jitsu Championships. Which meant, for economy’s sake, they were staging it Redmond.

Still, that made for barely half hour of driving to anyone who lived in Bend proper, which I did.

I hadn’t competed in the Eugene or Pasco competitions. I hadn’t competed in BJJ at all, except for the two in-house tournaments Connection Rio had put on as ice-breakers.

At the first one, held in November ahead of AGF Pasco, co-owner Josarah Asche had asked if I was going.

“I think you’d do well,” she said. “Dennis, G should compete.”

Professor Asche, who had been trying to get me to sign up for the Pasco event for the past four weeks, looked up from his bracket ledger for one moment and said, “Yes.”

I didn’t go to Pasco, though. Or Eugene. It’s not that I don’t like traveling—it’s that I hate traveling with the grim determination of a Hobbit set on staying in her cozy hole with her cat and her dog and her six bicycles.

But now AGF was coming to Bend (Redmond). My main excuse for not competing (the travel) was gone. And at six weeks out, I had to make a decision. 

“I can do that,” I said, mentally saying good-bye to my comfortable Hobbit routine. “But it’ll have to be the noon classes.

“Then you’re in,” said Professor Asche. “Be sure to tell André.” 

André is one of the assistant instructors and he had just taken over the noon classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays—and sometimes Fridays. Which would contribute three of my five days a week of training (because if you’re doing four, you might as well do five). If you took Uncle Iroh, de-aged him to when he had dark hair, trimmed it, gave him a Portuguese accent, and then had him be a master of Magical Ground Fighting instead of Firebending, you would have a pretty good mental image of André.

Aside: André would tell me to tell you that he is not a master of Magical Ground Fighting (AKA BJJ), he just “knows some things,” and “has been doing it for a while.”

Which he is of course correct. Sort of like Yoda “knows some things,” and “has been doing it for a while.”

“You are competing!” he exclaimed, when I told him. Then he frowned. “When?”

“April 6th,” I told him.

“Oh, good,” he said. “Then we have some time. I am gonna show you some things. Tomorrow. It will change your life.”

André showed me a lot of things in those six weeks, including that if you cross your legs the correct way in a same-side arm bar you can actually get more power out of it—but it you do it the wrong way then your opponent sits up and passes your guard.

(If you train BJJ you should be able to figure this out if you think about it for 30 seconds. If you don’t train BJJ, just trust me.)

If you could have graphed my nerves as a line leading up to the tournament, it would have looked like some moderate hills (when I thought about the tournament) and valleys (when I thought about literally anything else including my taxes), with a small mountain-spike when I actually registered for the thing, and then gradually increasing hills and decreasing valleys as the weeks ticked by until, by the week preceding the competition, it was soaring among the Himalayas.

April 6 2024

“This is bad,” I told my mom over the phone on the morning of the competition. “It’s starting to affect my appetite.” (Remember, I am a Hobbit. A 5’7” 155 lb Hobbit.) “I haven’t been this nervous since my first day guiding Class IVs!”

“Yes, I remember,” said my mom—who has had to weather my nerves for everything from horse shows to pet health crises over the years. “But you survived that!”

This was meant to be comforting, and it was—but not perhaps in the way my mom intended. Because it had made me think about Class IV whitewater.

Class IV whitewater isn’t as bad as Class V whitewater, but it’s still not water you really want to swim in—that’s the whole point of the raft! But it’s not uncommon for it to turn rafters into swimmers—and I’d been one of those swimmers. Many, many times.

There’s a saying about training for fights: train like your opponent is training every day specifically to beat you.

I’d been mentally nerving myself up to fight that person for the last month.

Thinking about whitewater reminded me that there is no person on this planet as strong as the Kaweah River. And unlike a BJJ tournament, you can’t tap out of a Class IV rapid.

It made my nerve graph go down for all of a minute.

It went right back up again the next minute, but it was helpful to remember my time on (and in) the river, just to keep some perspective.

Once I was in my car and driving to Redmond, the nerve-line began gradually to descend. It stepped down a notch when I parked my car. Another when I walked inside and immediately spotted half a dozen people in Connection Rio sweatshirts. Another after I checked in. And another after I weighed in.

Each step, each hurdle, driving me like a reluctant cow toward the loading dock.

Then I saw Josarah. She smiled at me and said, “I’m excited to see you fight!”

Up went the nerves again!

“Don’t overthink it,” Austin told me. “You’re really good.”

That didn’t do anything one way or the other for my nerves, but it was really encouraging. Austin is that delightful combination of big and heavy and fast that makes him great to train with and terrible to fight. Which I got to see him do since his matches were just ahead of my staging time.

Austin’s first match ended in one minute with a smother submission. His next match went the whole five minutes in which time he ran a short clinic on How To Achieve and Maintain A Dominant Position on a Resisting Partner.

It was very inspiring.

At this point I’d lost track of my nerve graph. I was so excited I had to focus on the small, mundane things like remembering to drink water, and walking down to check in for staging.

If you’ve only ever watched combat sports in the Olympics, where they have the two competitors along on a stage, please shake that mental image out of your mind. At almost any other level tournaments run multiple matches at a time in quick succession. At this one there were four mats—so you could have up to four matches going on at one time—and were were in the gymnasium of a middle school. The mats were in the center, making a long rectangle, with a plastic barricade erected around it. At one of the short ends of this rectangle was the weigh-in station, the AGF merchandise booth, and the podium. Along the front long side were some bleachers covered in bags and backpacks and a couple sleeping children, while the spectators were crowded up against the barricade. The back side was the same, minus the bleachers. And at the far end of the rectangle of mats was the Bull Pen. This was just an area of floor that had been divided into four sections with blue painter’s tape, one for each of the mats. To get into the Bull Pen you had to show your weight card, which also had your matches on it, and pass a uniform inspection. And you had to get into the Bull Pen to be called to your mat, which could happen anywhere from one minute to one hour after your staging time.

My first match had a staging time of 2:45pm, so that was when I presented my weight card to the uniform checker and got admitted to the Bull Pen. I went and stood in the square marked “4” (because my match would be held on Mat 4), where I was joined by a surprising number of women. Five, to be exact. Three were clearly not in my division. AGF divides you by rank, weight and age, so at smaller tournaments three- or even two-person divisions are not uncommon. Only one of the other women was about my age (30+) and about my size (150-165 lbs). She had her blond hair in lines of dutch-style braids that made her look like a sort of dragon-person, and just as I was sizing her up, she was also sizing me up.

It’s a funny feeling seeing your competition for the first time. In the past, in other competitions, I’ve felt intimidated. This time I was just excited.

Here we were, two women in our thirties who were both beginners at jiu jitsu and we were gonna fight!

Three, in fact, as a sixth woman joined the Mat 4 box.

“Natalie, Nicolette, G!” said the runner, waving us down. “Mat 4, let’s go.”

We were walking down the inside of the barricade, past the first three mats on one side and several of my teammates on the other. Connection Rio had fielded the most athletes in this tournament, and it showed in that there were entire divisions made up only of CRA fighters.

Not the Women’s White Belt No-Gi Masters Middleweight division, however. Not only was I the only Connection Rio female in that division—I was the only adult Connection Rio female at the competition. My teammate Kylee had entered, but despite the organizer’s best efforts they had not been able to figure out an opponent for her. There was simply no one else who was at all analogous to an adult female blue belt under 135 lbs.

So having three people in my division felt like a victory in of itself, and standing there behind the mat, waiting for the ringmaster to set up the match, I felt a strange sense of camaraderie with these women. The lightweights had joined us as well, and even without talking we did the thing that women do when you get enough of us together to do a difficult task.

We got happy.

The fighting metaphor gets overused, in my opinion. There’s fighting and then there’s fighting and then there’s someone has grabbed me and they are trying to kill me and I’ve gotta do something. But I think it’s safe to say, for every woman who has ever stepped onto a mat or into a ring, the real fight started long ago. While the other woman might be her opponent, they are both in the midst of a larger battle against an enemy that surrounds them and permeates their world and will likely outlast them. It is the enemy of everyone who seeks independence, self-determination, and freedom from hatred, but it attacks women with particular vindictiveness.

For everyone in combat sports—but especially for women—to fight is to win.

But actually winning is still better.

“Natalie, you’re in blue,” said the ringmaster. “G, you’re in red.”

This was a no-gi fight. We were just in our rashguards, which were both combinations of black and gray with some spot colors. So competitors are given ankle bands of either blue or red, so they can be scored correctly.

“Does it matter which leg?” I remember asking the referee as I stumbled out of my shoes—required attire everywhere except the mat, where they were prohibited.

I remember seeing him shake his head. I forget which ankle I put it on. I was lined up at the top of the rapid and the current was pulling me inexorably forward.

Someone shouted, “Go, G!”

“Shake my hand,” the referee instructed each of us in turn. Then, “Shake her hand.” We did. And then, “Grapple!”

That was the last thing I remember hearing until a minute later, when I heard my own voice say, “Ref, she’s tapping.”

What had happened was this: Natalie had shot a single leg takedown, which is a very common, high-percentage takedown. It is so common and high-percentage that I have had everyone in my gym shoot one on me and some time or another, and I’d done what I normally do in those situations: I grabbed Natalie’s neck and sat down into guard.

Now, normally when I do this the person I’m fighting is either very new (they don’t know how to defend a guillotine choke) or very big (they don’t care) or both, and usually (if they are new) I can make life very uncomfortable for them for long enough that when they eventually break out of it they are so winded that I can flip them over so I’m in a dominant position and can do a choke I’m actually good at. I’d been training one very specially for this tournament. I didn’t think I would ever actually finish anyone with a guillotine.

So I sat back with Natalie’s head pinned against my ribcage and my arms around her head and neck and sort of crunched my whole body, trying to force her to expend a terminal amount of energy just to get out.

“Straighten your legs, G,” Josarah said.

I didn’t hear her. Instead, in my head, I was doing the puzzle you do in jiu jitsu when you’ve got 80% of a choke and are wondering how can I make this 100% of a choke?

I had my left forearm under Natalie’s chin, my left hand gable-gripped with my right. In my hurry to grab her neck I’d gripped the wrong way, so it was the flat of my forearm instead of the blade that was across her trachea. Not ideal for choking. I could try to switch my grips, but that risked giving her an easy-out of the choke. But I had control of her hips through my legs, and I figured if I pushed her body down it would increase the pressure on her neck.

I began to straighten my legs. I realized then that I could also put more pressure on her arm that was trapped along with her neck, so I did.

It was about then that she tapped. But she did it with the hand that was hidden from the referee by my body. That was when I said, 

“Ref, she’s tapping.”

At the same time she started tapping with her other hand.

“Break!” said the referee.

We broke. We stood up. The referee took us each by a hand and presented us to the ringmaster. He raised my hand.

“Winner, red, submission!”

He turned us around to face the other half of the audience.

“Winner, red, submission! Shake hands.”

He was ready to make us shake hands, too, but we didn’t need much encouraging.

To fight is to win, but it’s still better to win. And I’d won my first ever competitive jiu jitsu match by submission in under a minute.

I then got to hang out behind the ringmaster’s station and watch the lightweights fight, and then watch Natalie fight Nicolette.

“Go, Natalie!” I shouted. “Also, go Nicolette!”

Because of the bracketing system AGF used, if Natalie beat Nicolette that would conclude our division, with me taking first, Natalie second and Nicolette third. But if Nicolette beat Natalie, I would then get to fight Nicolette for first place.

“You probably want Natalie to win, because then you win,” the ringmaster told me.

I wasn’t sure. I kind of wanted to fight Nicolette. I’d just won my first match by submission. I could have been put to fight Austin next and I’d have been happy.

It was not to be, however. Natalie finished Nicolette with seconds remaining and we were sent to the podium in alphabetical order.

And even though I was in the gymnasium of a middle school in Central Oregon having a gold-colored medal put around my neck by a teenage volunteer who’d already done that hundreds of times that day, in my head I was hearing the victory march from Star Wars: A New Hope and I felt like Luke Skywalker.

There is a picture of the entire Women’s White Belt No Gi Masters Middleweight division crowded onto the top tier of the podium. I had Natalie and Nicolette get up there with me. In the picture we’re all smiling like we just blew up our own personal Death Stars.

To fight is to win.

I got to fight two more times that evening. I’d entered both my weight division in the Gi (that’s the pajamas, for those unfamiliar with Japanese-lineage martial arts) and the Challenger II division, which was for all (female white belt) competitors 150 lbs and up. But the only other such competitor in the competition was Natalie, and she hadn’t, so they’d sized me “down” to the Women’s White Belt Gi Adult Middleweight, which was the division for women 20+ (which, to be fair, I am). My lone competitor was also a transplant: Nora, who had entered the Female Gray Belt Teen (15-16) Heavyweight (up to 160 lbs) division also had no competition, so they’d sized her “up” to the analogous Adult division.

You might think it’s unfair pitting a teenager against someone twice her age—even if they are roughly the same size and experience level (kids and teens in BJJ get incremental colored belts between white and blue, of which gray is one step above white but would still be considered a white belt if they were 18). 

I was thinking that I was enough of a menace at 15 without any formal training so probably Nora would be fine.

Nora was more than fine. She was the teenage ninja who put my body into involuntary plow pose and my mind into whitewater mode.

There’s this thing that switches in my brain when things go suddenly and terribly wrong. I call it whitewater mode. In whitewater, you cannot afford to waste any time denying what is happening (“I can’t believe the boat is flipping over!”) you just have to do the only thing you can to try to prevent it (throw yourself onto the high side of the raft) and if that doesn’t work, do the next thing.

As I saw my feet get swept up into the air as Nora stood up my mind went into whitewater mode.

I had her right arm glued to my chest, her shoulder pinched between my thighs. If I could only straighten my body I could over extend her arm to the point that she would have to tap, or have her arm break. Naturally she did not want me to do this, so she had stood up and was trying to keep me folded in half. She was doing a very good job of this.

I crossed my ankles, the way André had showed me, and did a slow jack-knife with my entire body, while rotating around her arm—trying to get out from under her. The result was Nora got pushed onto her back, and I ended up lying under her arm with my legs over her chest and my head angled down by her hips. Her arm was straight.

I began to lift my hips.

“Break, break!” said the referee.

He did not mean I should break Nora’s arm. He meant I should let go, so I wouldn’t. Referees can and do stop matches if they feel a competitor is going to allow themself to be injured. It’s basically the referee tapping for them.

I let go of Nora’s wrists—and only Nora’s wrists—because my ears were full of river noise and I didn’t quite believe what I’d just heard.

Nora immediately crossed her arms over her chest, each hand grabbing a fist full of the other’s sleeve. No more arm bar.

“Okay,” said the ref. “Keep going.”

I could have been confused, but fortunately I was still in whitewater mode and so I just did the next thing. I knew how to break the defense Nora was using, so I went about it. Just as I had hundreds of times in training.

Sit up. Scoop both her arms into my chest.

(“You love that arm,” Professor Asche would tell us. “You want to take it home with you!”)

I began to straighten my body again. Nora stood up. I thought, “I wonder if I can get an upside-down arm bar?”

And then the buzzer went.

Later, after he watched the video of the fight, Professor Asche told me the referee had made a mistake—he should have called the match when he told me to break.

“But it looked like you got the tap at the end,” he said.

I had to tell him that no, Nora hadn’t tapped.

But I’d still won decisively on points, so it amounted to the same thing as far as the competition went. As we were the only two people in that division, Nora and I got to trot down to the podium and get out medals. And then I got to trot all the way back to the Bull Pen and go against Natalie a second time.

Natalie, who’d been waiting in the Bull Pen for almost half an hour by this time, watching me fight Nora. We got called to our mat almost as soon as I got there.

Either Natalie was much more confident in the gi or she’d taken her earlier loss and turned it into fuel or both. Either way she didn’t give me a single leg to counter and I spent most of the match getting out of and then passing her guard.  I got settled in mount just long enough to score points and then she reversed us, earning some points herself. But it was too little too late and the timer went off while I was still working to pull off a submission from guard.

And that was that. One last time I got to hear the Star Wars victory march in my head, and then I got to hang out and watch three of my favorite training buddies all go against each other in the Male Gi Blue Belt Seniors Lightweight division. Yoshi, Brett and X-Mann have cumulatively been a big impact (sometimes literally) on my jiu jitsu, but X-Mann deserves special mention because it was a chance meeting with him in the Deschutes County Services parking lot, where we were both in line to pick up our winter delivery of vegetables from a local farm, that led me to Connection Rio Jiu Jitsu Academy that dark and snowy March morning.

“Yeah, come and try it,” he’d said. “You either like it or you don’t.”

Two years later, after going 3-0 in the tournament I called my mom as soon as I was in my car and driving home.

“Mom!” I shouted. “Have I mentioned I love BJJ?”

Prior to the competition I’d been planning on returning to my previous routine of 3x/week training, which allowed for other things like swimming and more bike rides. After reviewing the videos of my matches, however, all I could think was, Damn I gotta get back to the gym—I have so much to work on!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post! Tomorrow CSA members can look forward to a Valdelluna update and next week I’ll return with the sketches from my trip to San Jose. If you’re not a CSA member yet, give it a shot!

Either way, I’ll see you around the internet. Or on the mats.

Save your elbows: tap early!

G